Word: credit-card
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...puritans now. over the past two years, Americans have largely stopped spending more money than we had and running up credit-card tabs we couldn't pay off. To a great extent, we've been hectored into behaving more like our parsimonious Pilgrim forebears, whose expression of gratitude we celebrate Nov. 26. But the day after Thanksgiving is Black Friday, the traditional start of the holiday shopping season, and it's in need of all the consumption it can get: conspicuous, ridiculous, tasteless or otherwise. It could take a Snuggie Christmas to keep the economy on the mend. Last holiday...
...also realize that part of what got us here was overspending, and that that overspending was fostered by a shopping culture that uses cheap goods to hook people on feeling like they're winning at something. As a country, we held nearly $1 trillion in credit-card debt this time last year-about the same as the value of all the goods and services produced in South Korea annually. We've bought so much stuff that we've struggled to find places to fit it all. The U.S. went from having 300 million square feet of self-storage space...
...Banks, credit-card companies and other financial firms are doing everything they can to wean us off paper. Tracking our accounts online is better for the environment, they say, more convenient and safer too, since we won't have sensitive data sitting in our mailboxes. (The fact that firms save about $1 per statement tends not to make it into the pitch...
Companies are asking, cajoling, even paying people to ditch paper--and it's working. Two years ago, 13% of us got credit-card statements online only; today, 24% do. But as we stop holding that information in our hands once a month in favor of glancing at account balances on our computers or cell phones moments before we buy, could we be losing the big picture of where all the money goes...
...line of reasoning: Much of what governs people’s behavior when it comes to credit and debit cards are poorly designed rules, which allow things like overdraft services to systematically take advantage of people’s laziness or bad habits. Either way, the outcome is predatory. There is no other word to explain the fact that Americans carry an average of eight credit cards and as much as $10,000 in unpaid balances and that, as a country, our collective credit-card debt now tops $960 billion. To shame that these costs fall on the shoulders...